


Niveus

by lucymonster



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Second person POV, Sibling Bonding, actually a lot of it is just angst, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 07:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1257730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have seen the cold devour her once already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Niveus

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Vorvayne and Taydev for all the cheerleading, commentary and support.

Winter is approaching, and she will not take her breakfast.

Untouched rice porridge cools slowly in its bowl beside a book propped open on its third page - the most she can read in a sitting, these days, before fatigue compels her to lie down and rest. Formality has long since faded to irrelevance; you sit cross-legged and let her cushion her head in your lap, combing your fingers through limp, dishevelled hair that once fell thick and glossy about her face.

In summers past, she used to hide from you until her morning grooming was complete. Her dishevelment was unseemly, she said, and the sight of her tousled hair was a privilege - a sight glimpsed only in brief, illusory moments of intimacy when she lay sated in your arms as her galloping heart slowed and you thought you had ascended to heaven. It’s different now. Her deteriorating health has brought you closer to her than you ever were before; there were days in the past when you would have ached for this level of trust, this level of openness. But now her eyes are glassy, distant, and the first thing you do when you wake each morning is check her pulse.

They tell you there’s still time left, but you fear.

“Byakuya-sama.” Her voice is strained and cracked, and her breath against your leg feels colder than it should. “Did you sleep at all last night?” Even now she worries for you, faults herself for the sickness that keeps you awake watching over her. 

So you keep your voice gentle, reassuring. “You worry too much, Hisana. Of course I slept.” It’s not a lie - there was an hour at least, just before dawn, when you’re sure you drifted off.

“I’m cold.” The words are a cue you’ve heard all too often these past weeks, and you wrap the blanket tighter around her shoulders, feels the frosty chill of her skin where your hand brushes her neck. She shakes her head, brows furrowed in distress. “That won’t help.” It’s the closest she’s ever come to asking, and you gather her close, wraps your arms around her, will the warmth of your body (strong and healthy and yet _useless_ , so useless) to seep its way through to her frostbitten bones. 

Her breath comes easier, but you know it’s only temporary.

- 

Winter is her legacy: you carry it with you at all times, balanced high on a pedestal of ice where the useless heat of your body and soul cannot touch it. There are nights when you awaken drenched in sweat, burning from the inside out, and the panic you feel is like an iron claw around your windpipe. You fear that your warmth will thaw her and melt her away, memories evaporating in the heat of the inferno that threatens to consume your heart.

Self-containment is better. You quench the flames and let their heat dissipate, and the chill that follows is a soothing balm on your charred flesh.

But there are two of her. She comes to you in a new form ( _sister_ , you whisper again and again, as if enough repetition will make it true) and she is small and frail as ever, pulling her winter coat tight around her shoulders like a blanket, and the spirit inside her sings to you of winter’s first snowfall. 

You watch her closely, and you do not reach out - like a snowflake, she would melt away to nothing in the palm of your hand.

Watching her grow is like watching her perish in slow motion. Her power is a blood-pact forged with winter, and you try to slow her progress but it’s futile - under the shadow of your cold supervision she flourishes, finds greater strength with every passing day. She too is getting colder, and there are days when she will not take her breakfast (too busy training, she says) and other days (most of them) when she will not look you in the eye at all.

There is nothing you can do: your mind is clouded by dual concepts that refuse to reconcile, because there is Rukia ( _sister, here now_ ) and there is Hisana ( _wife, once was_ ) and all your best efforts cannot chase the chill from either of their bones. You watch Rukia closely, make sure every sip of her tea is drunk, make sure every night a fire is lit to warm her room (and pray that the balance will hold, that she will neither melt nor freeze). And Hisana’s grave attracts the afternoon sun, but the stone always feels cold to you when your knees hit the ground in front of it.

-

There are nights when her dreams break forth to chill the air around her until frost creeps in under your bedroom door. Instinct tells you to rush to her side - but for what? To rest her head in your lap and hold her? The only warmth you have to give is in your flesh, in your bones, and Rukia is not Hisana. You’re fighting the same battle but the rules of engagement are different: there is nothing you can do to warm her.

You keep to your bed where her chill can only just reach you, and lie awake committing every icy gust of her reiatsu to memory.

-

Some of the embers in your soul survived your attempts to stamp them out. You learn this in the moment the traitor’s sword pierces your chest, and hot blood spatters the ground and soaks into her uniform where she holds your broken body against her. You imagine the crimson stain leaking through the fabric to touch her skin, and nausea roils in your stomach and darkens the corners of your vision.

“I want to know more about Hisa...about Nee-sama,” she says as she sits by your bed in the hospital, hand resting on the covers inches from yours in a gesture you don’t know quite how to interpret. “How did you come to meet her?”

Your throat is dry; her fingers trace idle circles on the covers. “Chance,” you say, and make a conscious effort to strike out both the ‘cruel’ and the ‘blessed’ that well up in the word’s wake. “We were...caught in a snowstorm together.” In the cosy private haven of a well-heated drinking parlour with a locked door to block out the threat of the cold, but there are some stories you tell to your sister and others you do not.

(And you still remember how cold her hands were, even then, and how concerned you were and how she brushed it off with a charming professional smile.)

“A snowstorm...how romantic,” says Rukia, and her eyes are bright, cheeks flushed with some unsteady blend of embarrassment and pleasure. (And this is less like reassurance and much more like Hisana’s face on their wedding day: more sincere, less polished.)  “What was she like? Was she ever a soldier?”

 _Was she anything like me_ , is the unspoken question that rings in your ears. The answer - that Hisana couldn’t fight if her life and safety and dignity depended on it, as she learned more than once in the years before you met her - falls flat on your tongue. “She wasn’t a soldier,” you say, “but she had courage of a different kind.” Courage, and a deep chill residing in the marrow of her bones. Those, beyond physical appearance, are the only true markers of their sisterhood.

But something in your voice must sound like fatigue, because Rukia looks ashamed of herself and she’s leaning forward to clasp your hand; her fingers are as cold as ice. “Forgive me - I ask too many questions,” she says. “I’ll be silent now.” Her grip tightens minutely before releasing, and you struggle not to shiver. “Unohana-taichou says I should encourage you to save your energy for healing.”

 _Do not worry about me_ , you want to tell her. You’re more concerned with the ice in her touch, and the bitter cold of the reiatsu that you still feel swirling around you.

And yet somehow her shoulders are straight, and she does not hunch or huddle against the chill.

-

You catch fire on the day when winter descends from her blade like an avalanche, and the icy haze of her reiatsu mingles with the fog of your breath in the air. Fear itself shatters against the cutting edge of her sword, and with it fall the broken shards of your misconceptions - because it dawns on you now how utterly mistaken you have been.

She is winter incarnate, she is ice and snow and frost, she is the biting cold that freezes blood and hardens bone - but beneath the ice you still feel the pulse of her reiatsu, stronger now than ever. And her shoulders are not slumped and her hair is not dishevelled and she is not her sister, not a spectre, and she will not fade.

And the inferno that rages in your heart cannot hurt her.

You know what to do when her feet touch the ground. Her hand in yours is tiny and there’s balance in the exchange of heat between you: the ice gnaws at your fingers but you hold on, let the warmth of your skin thaw her frozen, cracking flesh. “Melt slowly, Rukia.” The air between you is thick with fog. “Take your time.” You cast your voice like a blanket around her shoulders, and her mantle of ice begins to melt around her; the shape of her beneath is still intact, and your sigh sends a visible tendril of warmth and relief through the air.

She is winter incarnate, and your heart is an inferno in the height of unforgiving summer - but the place you meet is springtime, where the frost melts into tiny dewdrops on the ground.

“It was a splendid bankai,” you say. Splendid, and perilous - but you’ve known this about her since the first time you felt the coldness of her hands. You’ve always known that the ice in her soul was dangerous; already you’ve seen those hands turn blue, fingers slipping as they weakly cling to the last threads of life. You’d forgotten, perhaps, that those weren’t really _her_ hands you saw.

“The slightest mistake could kill you.” Could. Will. _Already did_. The difference seems more clearly defined than you used to remember it. “Handle it carefully. Never be rash.” It’s the highest duty you can ask of her; the most essential part of the bargain the two of you must strike.

Because the warmth of your body, the fire in your soul - they were never useless. They have burned you a path to here, to now, and you will hold your head high as you lead her into battle and clasp her hands to thaw them when they grow too cold to move.

And she will be _magnificent_.

 

 


End file.
